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Miss Connections: Love Lockdown Edition

Boston’s been through a lot this week. Its people have been subjected to emotional rugby, which is a game I am convinced has no rules other than “hurt each other,” only made worse by the relentless media coverage.

But through it all, Bostonians carried on—living, loving, loving from afar, loving in completely inappropriate ways and then posting about them on the Internet. Such as this first MC:

A much better show than Oblivion! – m4mw – 41 (Danvers)

Not a missed connection, really — I saw everything! (a la Patrick Stewart in “Extras”) — but thanks to the young couple who spent the entire, overlooooong 5 pm showing of Oblivion at Liberty Tree shamelessly getting it on in the back row. Obviously, I’m the guy who was sitting midway down the row shamelessly watching!

Obviously!

I suppose thanks are also due to the producers of this particular big-budget snoozer for not providing any competition to your writhing lapsex. I give you a five star review, three more than that flick deserves….

You didn’t seem to mind my brazenly watching you go at it — you even stuck around a bit as the credits rolled, perhaps waiting for me to leave. (I wanted to see who the key grip was, honest!) Anyway, if you enjoyed the added thrill of an audience, hit me up – the next matinee tickets will be on me. 🙂

The best part about this MC is that this man has clearly realized a fetish he never knew he had: being able to be a movie snob and an envoyer at the same time! Getting off to his own snarky one-liners about the movie he’s watching while others are getting off! When he says “the next matinee tickets will be on me,” he means it—because if there’s not a film playing at the same time, he’s not interested.

But as skeezy as it is to be getting down and dirty in a movie theater, and even moreso the man watching it, this next MC is truly in poor taste:

Girl on CNN – m4w – 28 (Watertown)

Just wanting to let the girl that was interviewed by CNN after the suspect was caught know that she is hot.

Solitary confinement can do a lot of crazy shit to your psyche. My brother was once put in solitary confinement in the Navy (and it had nothing to do with ‘Don’t Ask Don’t Tell,’ so you can put away the jokes about “seamen,” as if my grandmother hasn’t made them already anyway). He said he learned how to win at Monopoly…against himself. I can’t remember ever finishing a game of Monopoly, aka The Four-Hour Exercise in How to Steal Money from the Bank Without Anyone Noticing, let alone after I’d spent time making up my own alter ego and then giving her the ol’ Capitalism Shakedown. The only time I’ve been in solitary confinement was (semi-)voluntarily for much of my childhood, and I ended up writing poetry…about how much I love America. Like I said: it changes people.

So it’s not totally unreasonable for this guy to make a totally inappropriate advance after being stuck in his house for hours on end. I mean, this woman was probably the first one he’d seen all day, if you don’t include his lipstick-smeared right hand.

But how, how how how did he justify this to himself? “I wish I could care about what this woman is saying, or the horror that my entire city went through over the past few days, but all I can think about is how sexy her mouth looks when she says, ‘I’m just happy the terrorists have been caught.’ Mmmmm. It’s even hotter than when my hand-mouth says it.”

The next poster has significantly better judgment when it comes to understanding what is MC-appropriate:

Hey, girl, hey. – w4w – 21 (Davis Sq.)

Hey. You with the face. I saw you looking and LIKING. Thumbs up. Two of em. BAM. Saw you outside of Diesel looking gay as a fish. And I like that. A lot. Hit me up. Alright, you had navy and green flannel on with these tight black jeans. Rocking a nice big pair of boots with laces. You had these glasses on… you look smart like WHOA. Like you go to Tufts or something. You probably have a tattoo. I’ll probably like it.

The fact that “gay as a fish” and “flannel” describes half (which, if anything, is a severe underestimate) of the clientele of Diesel, and that I’m sure similarly quirky and bold, yet coy and tongue-in-cheek, MCs have been posted for them many times, did not make me less endeared to this one. I think it’s because of the poster’s obvious self-awareness in writing this, and her ability to point out the ridiculousness of MCs in general without literally pointing it out (“Hey. You with the face.” instead of, “There’s no way you’ll ever see this, but…” =1,000,000 eprops [those are still legal virtual tender, right?]).

It could also be that I imagine Tom Cruise voicing the lines, “I saw you looking and LIKING. Thumbs up. Two of em. BAM.” And who isn’t whisked away to Wet Dream World by the thought of Tom Cruise hitting on you?

Answer: All the humans.

But this last MC, as always, takes the award for Most Heartwarming:

You mailed me my lost wallet?!?! (Brighton Ave, Allston)

I’d had a horrible Friday night, trying to cope with my sister’s deteriorating condition due to cancer. I started crying at the bar, surrounded by my friends and went to try to find the bathroom to compose myself when one of the bar staff told me I had to leave and escorted me out. In no condition to be alone, I tried frantically to text my friends to come find me as drops of rain and tears fell onto my phone, to no avail. Lost, disoriented, abandoned and scared, I managed to find a main street to catch a cab home, shakily got out onto Brighton Ave and walked one block to my house, losing my wallet along the way.

When I finally realized it was missing, too much time had passed for any hope that in a well-trafficked area, I would find my wallet. The thought of canceling and replacing everything was a constant reminder all weekend of the anxiety, shame and sadness of that night. Something told me, the entire time, that it would come back to me.

I checked the mailbox every day to see if someone had dropped it in there and when I ever reached in and felt the mailer today my heart jumped. I couldn’t tear that stupid stretchy FedEx plastic fast enough. There it was! But the biggest surprise was not that all three of my credit cards, my Charlie card with over $50 on it and four $20 bills were inside, along with my license, library card, hospital cards and medical alert card (I have a chronic illness); it was that inside there was one extra thing: a small piece of paper torn from a notebook that read, “Hey, found your wallet on the ground in Allston. Hope losing it temp. didn’t cause too much trouble”

I had to fight back a tear, I was so grateful. It may seem like a small thing, but for me it was much more than a lost item, a hassle and money. I cannot express how proud I am of Boston right now, and this one particular, anonymous good Samaritan. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. You can be sure this good deed will be paid forward many-fold.

Boston has a reputation for being a city of cold-hearted bastards—which is perhaps not helped by the fact that many Bostonians pride themselves on being cold-hearted bastards—but it is small, astounding acts of kindness like this that prove even New Englanders can be nice.

Or that we need to build a wall around the city, Texas-style, to prevent any more foreigners from ruining our reputation as borderline sociopaths.